Microsoft technical support provides statement to customer on Virtual PC 6.x printing

We previously reported that after upgrading to Panther, several users with Virtual PC 6.1 and Windows 95 or Windows 2000 were not able to use emulation printing.

Now MacFixIt reader Stephen Keese reports receiving a helpful letter from Microsoft's technical support department noting that emulated printing may be addressed in a future release, as well as two potential workarounds:

"In the last weeks we have done a lot of research into the issue of emulated printing not working correctly in Virtual PC 6 after upgrading to Mac OS X. (Panther). There is no fix for this issue at this time. We have determined that since Network Printing delivers superior quality output, Microsoft will be focusing its resources on improving Network Printing over Emulated Printing. This Emulated Printing issue may be addressed in future versions of Virtual PC.

"The options currently available to get printing to work in Virtual PC are:

• Rollback your operating system from MacOS 10.3 to MacOS 10.2.8
• Use PDF printing software in Windows; it acts as a printer driver but saves the output to a PDF document instead of printing it to paper. You can then move this document to the Mac side and print it using the Apple Preview application."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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